Top stories concerning British Isles ancestral research from Irish born Scottish based professional family historian, author and tutor Chris Paton. Feel free to quote from this blog, but please credit British GENES if you do so. Should you wish to get in touch, contact me at christopherpaton @ tiscali.co.uk. Happy hunting!

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Friday, 2 March 2012

Talks on the Ulster Covenant

Forget the Titanic, this year also sees the 100th anniversary of the signing of a document in Ireland that demonstrated the vehement opposition to the cause of Home Rule by the island's Protestant population. In 1912 they feared the notion of Home Rule actually meaning 'Rome Rule', as the propaganda of the day alleged, thanks to the minority position of the Protestant people on an island wide basis which was largely Roman Catholic.

Some half a million people signed the Covenant on September 28th 1912 - strictly speaking the Ulster Covenant was signed by men and the equivalent Declaration of Loyalty by women. The records have been digitised and made freely accessible on the PRONI website at
http://applications.proni.gov.uk/UlsterCovenant/Search.aspx . The document was not only signed in Ireland, however, but in Britain and across the world. My two times great grandfather was a signatory in Glasgow (giving his home parish in Ireland in the process), whilst in China nine gentlemen also signed it - as I mentioned in my talk at Who Do You Think You Are Live last week, I was disappointed to learn they weren't actually Chinese, but instead service personnel on HMS Monmouth (I once viewed American Indians wearing sashes on an Orange walk in Belfast, so have always believed anything is possible when it comes to Ireland!).

Eddie Connolly has tweeted that a series of talks on the Covenant is to be held at Belfast's Westborne Presbyterian Community Church on the following dates: